sponsibility, and their own privileges. The pastor should beware of permitting himself to be erected into a pope, or even into a director of conscience. He should be the aid of liberty, not its substitute. These individuals, who form the choice ones of the flock, naturally feel a need of more intimate relations with the pastor, and of more thorough and more minute instruction. As they know more, they see they have more to learn. It would be wrong to have no regard to their case; and the pastor, isolated as he is in his parish, has as much need of them as they have of him. But he can not, in this matter, satisfy entirely them and himself. On the one hand, the pas tor is pastor of the whole flock, and, according to the precept of St. Paul (Acts, xxii., 28), must care for the whole flock; on the other hand, he ought, for the sake of the peace and unity of his flock, to be willing to deprive himself, and to deprive them also, of some lawful delights. Not without reflectior and caution should he appoint an extra-official service for their sakes especially.* The means of intercourse which pastoral visits, in some parishes, offer, should be preferred. We must not, however, let our measures for the welfare of the multitude carry the appearance of timidity or the fear of man, nor should the pastor dissemble his sympathy for those who are most zealous in serving God.t All pious men are not pious after the same manner: Almost always one element predominates, and some other suffers. There is always a weak side to be strengthened, with * No small offense was given, in one instance within the translator's knowledge, by a service intended distinctively for a class supposed to be in a higher state of religious feeling than the rest of the flock. It may be allowable to appoint a service of this description, but this instance gave proof that such a service ought not to be appointed "without reflection and caution."-Transl. + See the Praktische Bemerkungen of HERNHUTT, p. 103; Gemeinschaft der Erweckten. VARIOUS CLASSES OF PIOUS PERSONS. 255 which we must, in the first place, make ourselves acquainted. 1. To those in whom the principle of faith prevails we must recommend works, by insisting that, whatever changes may have taken place in our disposition and our state toward God, the law remains law; and that we may renounce by our works (Titus, i., 16) the God whom we profess to know, and whom we may know in truth. We must warn them of the snares which our natural man may find in Christian liberty; we must, without taking this liberty away, teach them how to use it prudently, and especially not to despise Christians less advanced or weak in the faith (Rom., xvi., 2), who dare not use their liberty, but whom we ought not, on that account, hastily to regard as strangers to the covenant of grace. 2. To those who, endeavoring to add to their faith virtue (2 Pet., i., 5), are in danger of forgetting in this so necessary industry that the first act of obedience is faith, and the work, par excellence, the work of God (John, vi., 29), is, to believe on Him whom He hath sent-we must show, as open at their side, that abyss of self-righteousness in which true righteousness is lost and disappears. 3. To the scrupulous, the timorous-that the kingdom of God does not consist in meat and drink, but in righteousness, in peace and in joy, through the Holy Spirit (Rom., xiv., 17); and that if we must be always proving anew what is acceptable to the Lord (Eph., v., 10), this useful exercise of conscience and of reason represses anxiety, and should unite with itself a feeling of tranquil trust in that God who, having given us the substantial truth, will certainly not permit an upright and sincere intention to err very seriously. 4. To the superstitious, that is to say, to those who, through a weakness of imagination, or a sort of spiritual sloth, prefer, in inquiring for the will of God, to consult some sign exterior to the conscience, which is the internal sign, we must show that the benefit of faith is to be found, not in our renouncing the natural means of knowing and judging, but in causing 256 VARIOUS CLASSES OF PIOUS PERSONS. us to make a good use of them; and that to proceed otherwise is under a vain appearance of piety, to remit to chance, or rather to passion, which authorizes all chances, the labor of determining our course. In short, the task of the minister as to those pious souls, whose various errors consist in the exaggeration of some true principle, is to re-establish the equilibrium, by inculcating the particular principle which they have lost sight of, either in practice or in theory. Certain doctrines, certain points of view, to which preaching ordinarily allows but little place, regain their importance in the care of souls; and we may say that in this sphere no article of truly Christian theology ever remains inactive. It is with all individual Christianity as it is with the forms of human government; at first each of them corresponds to the general idea of society, then more particularly to some one of the conditions of social life; in other words, each has a principle from which it borrows its form; but each also tends to exaggerate the principle on which it is founded, as if that principle were the social principle itself. Pure Christianity, which has been in some part defined, while pure society has been in no part, has a principle which can not be exaggerated, because it includes all principles, that is to say, all the weights and counter weights of truth. But with no individual has it this largeness and this perfection; all individual Christianity makes a principle to itself, which it incessantly tends to exaggerate, instead of tempering it with the opposite principle. To this contemperature must we recall the individual, either by presenting Christianity to him as a harmonious whole, or by preaching to him the truth which he has forgotten, or of which he makes no use. The work of grace in some souls conceals itself from all the world; it is concealed from themselves. These souls whom God has endued with a priceless docility are as mouldable as the water to the form of the vase. They are not born Christians, but they become Christians with so little effort, that they seem to owe to the beneficence of their nature what others obtain only at the expense of painful conflicts or of long reflection: So that these latter may say, "With a great price bought I this freedom;" while the others, at least in one sense, may reply, "but I was free-born." -Acts, xxii., 28. These souls sometimes betray themselves by wondrous signs at the solemn hour of death; but during life no one observed them; and had any one interrogated them, he would have obtained a very imperfect account of their faith. It is even possible that the imperfection of their theory reveals itself in some measure in imperfection of practice, and that they have not said as often and as loudly as others, Lord, Lord! Their faith remains in a state of involution and of synthesis. They have thought little of their religion because it was not in their nature to think much. We can not say that they have laid down their arms; for, to say the truth, they have never resisted. But by slow degrees they have conformed themselves to the Christian spirit, it has entered into their habits of life; they feel all that others think, and that which others, yet more happy, both think and feel; they renounce from the heart all righteousness, they embrace with the heart the mystery of mercy; their conscience has become tender; without method they practice a severe self-discipline; they know nothing, and they know every thing. Seek out these souls; they are more numerous, perhaps, than you suppose. Learn to encourage and cherish them: Turn them not out of the course which their nature prescribes to them: Force not these instruments of music to give forth sounds which they can not give forth; disturb them not with formularies; deprive them not of their naïveté ; accept their language-accommodate yours to theirs; and do not undertake to correct their expressions unless required by regard to their religious welfare, and only as far as this demands. II. We pass to the new converts. The fervor of their firstlove is useful directly by the works it produces: There are important ones among them which are peculiar to this period of the spiritual life. This fervor is also useful as a rebuke to those who have suffered the gift which was in them to be impaired It is a leaven which God is incessantly casting into the mass of the Church. But this period is not ordinarily that of moderation and balance of mind; and we know that the primitive Church interdicted the ministry to new converts. It is ordinarily the period of bitter zeal, of a controversial spirit, of severe judgments: we forget what we were the evening before, and we forget it the more, it seems, because we have ascended from so great a depth. Though we know that we ourselves have been the objects and the monuments of so great a patience, we are too ready to say impatiently of our neighbor, as the man of the parable, "Cut him down; why cumbereth he the ground!" It is also the time when we abuse Christian liberty; the time of presumption: We would preach to and school all the world, and perhaps the very person from whom we obtained our first light, whence results a danger to this last, also, who may not be always disposed to say with Moses, "Would to God all the Lord's people were prophets."-Numb., xi., 20. Let all this show the pastor that new converts should be indulgence and with severity. He must not depress the spirit which is in them, nor permit a demon to enter through the breach which an angel has made. treated with III. Another class is that of the awakened, although very often he whom we call awakened is a true convert, and the convert, as we term him, is but an awakened person. The awakening of a soul is the emotion of interest or inquietude which, after long unconcern, it feels toward spiritual things, and which differs from emotions of the same kind which it may have before felt, in that it has become an habitual and dominant state. It is a delicate matter to direct such souls. |